Stories

Red Dirt Ruby Conference is a two-day event - taking place in Oklahoma City, May 6-7th, 2010 - that will provide focused and up-to-date content and related training in four of the most important areas of active development in the Ruby community. These are the Ruby language itself, the Ruby on Rails framework, NoSQL databases, and web servers and hosting. We are also very happy to announce that Dave Thomas of the Pragmatic Programmers and Jim Weirich of EdgeCase will participate in the event as keynote speakers.

Late last Thursday night, after many trials and tribulations, the beta release of Rails 3 hit Gemcutter's shelves. The process certainly wasn't perfect, as the team found that pre-release gems don't play nicely with their more stable counterparts, but it's finally up there! So, pull it down and take a look at what well over a year of hard work and refactors has brought to you.

It's often difficult to know which 3rd party libraries work with which version of Rails. This is especially painful around major framework releases, too, as everyone scrambles to test, report, and patch popular plugins. So, the Rails core team has just released railsplugins.org. There you can both research and contribute to the public knowledge of the current compatibility status - in terms of Rails 3, jRuby, thread safety, and more - of your favorite application libraries.

There's been a lot of conversation about Bundler, and for very good reasons. Bundler is exceptional at managing, organizing, and deploying Ruby gems and libraries while intelligently resolving dependencies. It also provides several additional features (like pack and lock) which you'll come to love as you spend more time with it. This is the gem and dependency manager that you've always wished you could've had.

Rails 3 adds string escaping by default to your views to help protect against cross-site scripting. This is a major change from Rails 1 and 2 where you had to explicitly use the h() method. Also, Rails has been updated to use unobtrusive JavaScript when exercising the Rails view helpers. This not only gives you better usability, but it also makes Rails far more JavaScript framework agnostic.

If, for some reason, you're not a fan of ActiveRecord, Prototype, or really any other piece of Rails, then you may have gotten annoyed by the old Rails script/generate. New in Rails 3 is the ability to define (or have defined for you by gem developers!) the exact stack that you want to work with. Prefer shoulda or rspec? You got it! Cucumber? MongoDB? Alright by us! Now rails generate will build exactly what you're looking for, without making a fuss.

The beta release, while up and available to everyone, is a true beta and primarily targeted for open source contributors (gem and plugin developers, specifically). This release is intended to let them get their hands on the new framework well before it's intended that you'll be using for your everyday production applications. In fact, Rails 3 - while quite complete and functional - is not yet ready for your app, unless you write all of your source and support libraries yourself and are willing to take the leap. However, if you've got the skills and the time, please help test, report, and patch your favorite Rails gems and plugins, now!

Previous Episodes

The Caliper and Gemcutter integration, Crisis Camp Haiti, and MacRuby 0.5 are all discussed in this episode of Ruby5. Also, Bundler (Rails 3 beta!), the end of IE6 for Google, JQTouch, and HTML5 examples also made the cut. Also, you'll meet two new hosts, David Bock and Kim MacCormack.